Comments on: The Difference Between i3, i5, and i7 Processors

By: gordintoronto

gordintoronto — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:10:00 +0000

The vast majority of applications do the first thing, then the second thing, then the third thing; they don’t lend themselves to using multiple cores. Having two cores is useful, because when one program goes CPU-bound, you can still do something else. More cores are rarely helpful, unless you have an application which can use them.

Put another way, I don’t want eight cores that run at 2.0 GHz, I want two cores that run at 8 GHz!

By: long-time-lurker

long-time-lurker — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:01:00 +0000

umm… no breakdown on turbo modes and HyperTheading? I thought those are what really seperates the three lineups.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:19:00 +0000

What laptop you recommend me for a medium user, I want to play some average games, mainly emulators for PS2 and Gamecube (not newers games). At the same time, a good perfomarmance in Windows 7 and that my laptop last at least 3 or 4 years

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:32:00 +0000

There is also a L2 and L3 cache difference that affects performance

By: Tyler Melton

Tyler Melton — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:38:00 +0000

“Now, some of you might look at the clock rate of the i7 and note that it’s actually lower than
that of what’s supposed to be a ‘lower-end’ processor. There’s a reason
for that. You’ve got to consider how many cores each processor has. The
i7, with four cores at 1.7 Ghz each, will outperform an i3 with 2.3 Ghz
and two cores every time. The reason? Clock speed isn’t a total value.
It’s calculated per core of the processor. An i7 with a 1.7 clock speed
has all four cores running at 1.7. That’s important to keep in mind
when shopping around for a processor.”

This part is subjective depending on a number of variables. Such as the number of applications a user runs at any given time and whether or not those programs support multi-threading.